The Good Divorce Story

Most of us have a story in our heads about the ideal marriage—the fairy tale romance, the perfect wedding, The Ideal Husband, who may or may not resemble the powerful politician in the Oscar Wilde play of the same name. But the fairy tale divorce? We don’t have a backlog of cultural expectations that our own divorce is somehow failing to meet. Which is great, because we can write our own divorce story now.

First, we may have to let go of an old, negative narrative, such as the notion that a blended family must include an “evil step-mother,” or the more recent myth that all happy families are alike, and they resemble each other by featuring two married adults—no exceptions permitted.

The woman I wrote about last week who couldn’t get past her anger clung to a false narrative—the idea that divorce necessarily devastates everyone involved. Her home had not actually been washed away by a tsunami. She had her work, her children. She organized regular social events for large groups, attended church weekly, had the funds for manicures and new shoes and the body-hugging purple dress she was wearing when we met. We were out at a good party on a Friday night in Los Angeles, the lights of downtown twinkling far below. Yet the story in her head had been abruptly interrupted by her husband’s defection. She’d been a character in The Perfect Marriage. The movie had stopped midway, and without a new plot line, it was as if her life were a roll of film spilling out all over the floor, chaotic, flapping, un-spooled.

So many people I’ve spoken to about divorce struggle almost as much from narrative disconnect, believe it or not, as from the logistical changes.  Their story about what should have happened plagues them almost as much as the facts themselves.

Narrative disruption happens to all of us at some point in our lives. We lose the girl we loved, the job we thought defined us, the election or position that seemed rightfully ours. Rand Fishkin, the developer of the successful marketing software company, Moz, recently wrote a thoughtful post about how clinging to a false narrative dogged him in his career.

Understanding the narratives you’re telling yourself can help you rewrite them.  “Our stories create core schemas about ourselves," says child psychologist Daphne Anshel. “A lot of times when someone has a huge amount of change to integrate into their lives, they haven’t made meaning of it. That can lead to a sense of internal conflict.”  Anshel stresses nuance as a key to moving past limiting narratives while remaining honest with yourself and the reality of your life.

Rewriting your narrative to include the new facts of your life is not only necessary, but also can be powerful.  This is the core insight of the new field of posttraumatic growth.  A decade-plus of research shows that many people become stronger through the effort to make meaning out of unwanted, even traumatic, events.  As Lawrence Calhoun, lead author of a recent paper about posttraumatic growth, writes, “Loss, especially unexpected loss, disrupts an individual’s beliefs about the world and initiates a process of rebuilding an understanding. During this process, many people come to realize their own strengths, appreciate the impact of their relationships, and have new spiritual insights.”

The play An Ideal Husband, in some ways a narrative of a divorce averted, is not only a hilarious, moving classic piece of theater, but also an example of Anshel’s point about the value of nuance. The wife in the play learns of an early, shady business deal of her husband, a man she’d believed to be morally flawless. Her first instinct is to condemn him, turn away from the marriage, sink into shattered despair. Instead, she develops flexibility. She finds a way to accommodate a deviation in her script of what constitutes “ideal,” to accept a new view of this man she loves that includes the fact that in a moment of weakness in his youth, he'd made a dishonest deal that helped his career.

Those of us divorcing don’t have the opportunity to save our marriage through a new narrative, but we can work on taking a flexible view of the ideal life more broadly, a belief that lets us hold onto the best parts of the past and build a future—and a present story line—we love.

What does your good divorce look like? Write me and let me know, and tell me if you’d like to be featured in an upcoming post. Also . . . my first newsletter is out tomorrow! Please sign up to receive it, and let me know what you think.

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Wendy Paris is the author of Splitopia: Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well (Simon & Schuster/Atria, 2016). Splitopia and her work on divorce have been covered by The New York Times, Real Simple, The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Globe & Mail, Psychology Today, The Houston Chronicle, Salon.com, Parents.com, Family Law Quarterly, PsychCentral.com and radio and TV shows nationwide. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and is an advocate for family law reform. She is divorced, and lives in Santa Monica, California, a few blocks from her former husband, with whom she has a warm co-parenting relationship. 

Moving Past Anger in Divorce

Getting divorced is not a license to hate, nor a free pass to let loose your lowest impulses, or give in to your darkest, angriest or even most self-critical thoughts. When I suggest this idea to people, most agree.  Sure, they were angry for a while. But now they view their divorce as a sad reality, and are turning their focus toward recreating a life they love, not stewing in anger at the wrongs of their once-spouse.

But not everyone. Some people are so steeped in anger that they do not want to let it go. Such was the case of the tall, striking woman I met at a party on Friday. “I just have a different idea of marriage,” she said. “It’s for life. It can be hard, but you still work at it. My parents have been married for 50 years. I just have a different idea of marriage than most.”

“No you don't,” I said. “Most divorced people I’ve met planned to be married for life.”

She took a step back. “Everyone I know who is divorced said it was the worst, most devastating thing they’ve ever gone through. Everyone I know who is divorced says it would be better if he’d died.”

“You should make some new friends," I said. "Broaden your circle to include people who are doing well after divorce.” I looked up at this beautiful woman in her stylish dress. She looked strong on the outside. Inside, her anger was holding her back.

Now she was angry not only at her ex, but also at me. Clearly I should work at my social skills, such as not telling people things they don’t want to hear. But she was locked into a view of some “right” kind of life—that was not the life she was leading. As long as she held that view, she was stuck.

I understood that she was upset. She was reeling. This was not the life she'd planned to live. It can be unbelievably difficult to pull through divorce. More so than we’d guess. But moving past hate may be the most important step toward recovery.

Anger is a backward-looking emotion, and it can keep you trapped in the past you no longer have. Any number of people I’ve met told me they could feel that their anger was making them sick.  Or it was hurting their children, but not their ex.  These facts compelled them to move past it.

Focusing on the negative magnifies it. Highlighting the negatives while ignoring the positives of your marriage is a type of “distorted thinking,” as cognitive behavioral psychologists term it. This “all or nothing” thinking can increase hostility and aggressive behavior, and has been strongly linked to depression and relapse into clinical depression.

In her article "5 Voices of Divorce," divorce blogger Lisa Arends put it like this,  "Anger and gratitude are mutually exclusive. When your ire is up, counteract it with thankfulness. At first, it will feel forced and foreign. But keep practicing, and it will become second nature."

I agree with Arends. Moving past anger can take time. Focusing on all that you do have can help speed the process.

For a great book about conquering your own negative thoughts, check out Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David Burns, M.D.

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Wendy Paris is the author of Splitopia: Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well (Simon & Schuster/Atria, 2016). Splitopia and her work on divorce have been covered by The New York Times, Real Simple, The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Globe & Mail, Psychology Today, The Houston Chronicle, Salon.com, Parents.com, Family Law Quarterly, PsychCentral.com and radio and TV shows nationwide. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and is an advocate for family law reform. She is divorced, and lives in Santa Monica, California, a few blocks from her former husband, with whom she has a warm co-parenting relationship.